of the organ died away in lengthened whispers, and Miss
Leonora Wentworth, severe and awful, swept up through the middle aisle.
It was under these terrible circumstances that the Perpetual Curate,
with his heart throbbing and his head aching, began to intone the
morning service on that Easter Sunday, ever after a day so memorable in
the records of St Roque's.

CHAPTER IV.

Mr Wentworth's sermon on Easter Sunday was one which he himself long
remembered, though it is doubtful whether any of his congregation had
memories as faithful. To tell the truth, the young man put a black cross
upon it with his blackest ink, a memorial of meaning unknown to anybody
but himself. It was a curious little sermon, such as may still be heard
in some Anglican pulpits. Though he had heart and mind enough to
conceive something of those natural depths of divine significance and
human interest, which are the very essence of the Easter festival, it
was not into these that Mr Wentworth entered in his sermon. He spoke, in
very choice little sentences, of the beneficence of the Church in
appointing such a feast, and of all the beautiful arrangements she had
made for the keeping of it. But even in the speaking, in the excited
state of mind he was in, it occurred to the young man to see, by a
sudden flash of illumination, how much higher, how much more catholic,
after all, his teaching would have been, could he but have once ignored
the Church, and gone direct, as Nature bade, to that empty grave in
which all the hopes of humanity had been entombed. He saw it by gleams
of that perverse light which seemed more Satanic than heavenly in the
moments it chose for shining, while he was preaching his little sermon
about the Church and her beautiful institution of Easter, just as he had
seen the non-importance of his lily-wreath and surplices as he was about
to suffer martyrdom for them. All these circumstances were hard upon the
young man. Looking down straight into the severe iron-grey eyes of his
aunt Leonora, he could not of course so much as modify a single sentence
of the discourse he was uttering, no more than he could permit himself
to slur over a single monotone of the service; but that sudden bewildering
perception that he could have done so much better--that the loftiest
High-Churchism of all might have been consistent enough with
Skelmersdale, had he but gone into the heart of the matter--gave a
bitterness to the deeper, unseen current